


I Can See The Glowing Lights, I Can See Them Every Night

by teenuviel1227



Category: Day6 (Band)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, commission, everyone else mentioned in passing, side brian x ayeon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 16:03:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13978650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teenuviel1227/pseuds/teenuviel1227
Summary: In which, from adjacent balconies, Jae and Wonpil watch the night sky, if only for a glimpse at the stars.





	I Can See The Glowing Lights, I Can See Them Every Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jaepori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaepori/gifts).



> This piece was commissioned and I didn’t expect to get so emotional over it, but here we are. :)) This was based off of a prompt about Jae and Wonpil both looking up at the stars to be able to glimpse one another--unfortunately I suck at keeping links and I couldn’t find the exact tweet when I went to look.
> 
> As I think I mentioned in my only other JaePil fic, I am not a JaePil writer and tend to get extremely self-conscious when writing for this pairing because I’m never sure whether or not I can do it justice. But. Here is my try. 
> 
> Also, yes, I’ll be participating in [JaePil week](https://twitter.com/day6sailing/status/968701090828046337) JaePil this coming April (ya’ll can check it on Twitter, @day6sailing, we’re doing one ship week per month).
> 
> Title is from Hard To Find by The National.
> 
> This is the piece that Wonpil is playing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tr0otuiQuU
> 
>  
> 
> [Twitter](http://twitter.com/teenuviel1227)  
> [Blog](http://teenuviel1227.wordpress.com)  
> [Tumblr](http://teenuviel1227.tumblr.com)  
> [Curious Cat](http://curiouscat.me/teenuviel1227)

Moving here hasn’t been easy for Jae--not that anything ever was, but moving to Seoul, more than anything else that he’s experienced in his young life has been _the_ worst. More than anything, he craves the California sunshine: misses the bright but cool climate, misses seeing sunlight and not having it mean _humid_ or allergies or waking up sweaty in bed, the sheets clinging to his back like a man in a shipwreck clings to damp wood. It isn’t that he regrets moving, not exactly: how can he when the reason he’s here is testament to the fact that he’s made it? There was an opportunity for him to work as one of the curators at the Seoul Museum of Modern Art after they’d seen his thesis: an exploration of Andy Warhol’s pop culture images seen vis-a-vis the recent boom of k-pop. When he’d written it, really, it’d been selfish--it seemed like a way to make writing his graduate thesis easy, to be able to consolidate the ease and enjoyability of watching his favorite k-pop videos and somehow getting work done.

But, well, luck was a strange thing and the thesis had gotten traction, and voila--there was the job offer, much better than anything else that he’d been offered in LA. Plus, he was curious about the homeland: when his parents talked about it, it was always fondly, always with stories of laughing over a hot meal with friends, always about drinking escapades that would result in someone stumbling home after a tirade of embarrassing confessions. In highschool, Jae had been fairly reserved--and then in college, he’d been mostly entrenched in reading and art criticism: the thing about critics is, well, they’re usually overly critical and his college friends were really more _colleagues_ than anything. He was curious about camaraderie, about whether or not crossing the ocean would allow him to find it. 

In a lot of ways, there _was_ that--in Seoul, Jae’d met one of his best friends. Brian, the museum’s assistant director is extremely fun to be with and while their friendship had started off rocky (Brian was protective of all of the pieces, of the way that the interiors of the installations looked, but had eased up once he had seen how meticulously Jae worked), they’d taken to enjoying each and every art show that they helped put together. Jae experienced for the first time what a real Tequila headache was, how it felt to lug your friend up the stairs to their walk-up because they were too drunk to do it on their own at three in the morning after five bottles of Soju. But the thing is that Brian had Ayeon, his girlfriend of almost five years (and, unbeknownst to Jae, his fiance as of ten minutes ago), and although she ended up becoming Jae’s friend too, he usually felt like he was tagging along on their dates, like they asked him to come with them out to dinner or to cafes or (this was where he’d had his epiphany) brunch buffets mostly because they felt like he didn’t have anyone else to hang out with. Which, well, was true. And besides, seeing Brian and Ayeon together had made Jae realize what it was that he wanted now, as if he was working his way up Maslow’s pyramid--great job, check, cool apartment, check, bestfriend, check.

Now what?

Now, love.

Whenever Brian and Ayeon were in a room together, there was a certain _something_ about them. They could be across the room, not looking at each other, not touching or speaking, ever, but you would know somehow, that they were together, that they were in love. It was in the way that they both talked about the other casually, like a favorite book or a beloved film, like someone that they knew extremely well, like the backs of their hands, and still, wanted to know more and more.

Jae had been in lust before, had been in love the way that college kids are in love: there was, for example, his college boyfriend, Sungjin, an art major with whom he’d had a tumultuous but exciting relationship--crying fits, phone calls and crying at twelve in the morning, right out of a bad 2000s Jay Hernandez/Kirsten Dunst film. But now, the thing he finds himself craving is a more mature kind of love: he’s looking for someone who feels like home.

Here, in this city cradled between the hills, he is thinking of home--but he knows that California is just a name for some other unnameable thing. In California, right on the coast, with his sand in his toes, he would still be longing for the same thing: a person who made him feel like everything was going to be okay.

Tonight, Jae finds himself on his balcony, watching the night sky shift hues: he’s just gotten home from a twelve-hour shift at the museum. It’s almost four in the morning. At work, he and Brian are currently in the process putting together the special exhibit for Chuseok, where they’d be featuring the best work tackling freedom and fertility in South Korean culture starting next week. The work was beautiful, the installations and the way they’d arranged the space something that both he, Brian, and their bosses were extremely proud of. But also, he’s exhausted. But also, there’s that feeling that comes from flicking the lights on and knowing, knowing for certain that his apartment would be empty.

He’s decided to treat himself to a glass of white wine, to have it cool his nerves. He takes a sip, feels the cool liquid wet his parched lips, feels it move down his throat, feels his muscles relax. And then he hears it--a piano playing, a soft melody that Jae recognizes from years of music lessons.

He grins.

Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata--No. 14 in C# minor. An oldie but a goodie, melancholic but hopeful, maybe more melancholic _because_ of that hopefulness.

Jae’s gaze drifts across the way where he notices that the apartment opposite from his is the only apartment lit in its building, a single block of brightness in an otherwise glum facade. Through the window, he sees the pianist--dark-haired, porcelain-skinned, eyes half-shut, mouth slightly upturned in a half-smile--enraptured by the music, shoulders shifting like scales balancing out to some unseen object as he moves his fingers across the keys. Jae smiles, a warmth blooming in his heart.

What does it feel like to play like that? To be so absorbed in something that you would stay up this late to perform for an audience of no one?

The light spilling out onto the balcony from the glass sliding door is so warm, so golden, so like the sunlight he keeps craving, like the sunshine that has yet to light up the horizon. Maybe, Jae thinks, he won’t be up for the sun to rise, but at least he’ll be able to watch a beautiful man playing a beautiful song like it’s the only thing in the world that matters.

(In this moment, to Jae, it is.)

And then the music ceases. And then the man is reaching for something before stepping out onto the balcony to look up at the sky, too, a coffee cup in his hand. Jae feels his heart skip in his chest for the first time in what feels like forever.

Jae looks back up, enjoying how the stars twinkle, how they gleam bright in the darkness. When he looks back down, the beautiful man is looking at him, smiling.

Jae decides to take a chance, decides _what the hell_ , and raises his wine glass tentatively as if to say _cheers._ The man grins wider. Jae can almost hear his laugh--almost knows that it’s gentle, playful.

The man raises his coffee cup.

Maybe tomorrow, Jae thinks. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll introduce myself.

  


Wonpil gets up early: it’s one of the things that had been ingrained in him early on--his mother is a fan of Benjamin Franklin’s-- _early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise._ Also, one doesn’t become a classical pianist by _not_ playing the piano. Music is a discipline as much as it is an art. So, as much as he can, he makes sure that his days are filled with it. He makes sure that most of his day is spent practicing or listening to records, if not deciphering new sheet music or working on his own compositions.

After all, what else does it mean to be a musician if not that? After all, how many people are lucky enough to have figured out what they want to do so early in their lives? His schedule is one he’s stuck to since he was six years old. He isn’t going to stop now--not when he’s booked five shows for Seoul, three for Paris, one for Brussels over the next six months. Now, more than ever, it matters to make music and to do it the best way that he can.

His day starts at two in the morning: a cold shower and hearty breakfast, warm-ups done by half-past three, a run-through of Moonlight Sonata (his personal favorite) and then a short break to have a cup of coffee and watch the moon set. His best and oldest friend, Dowoon, an orchestra drummer, had told him that referring to the sunrise as a moon set was the oddest thing that he’d ever heard. But if you kept the hours that Wonpil did, if you were in bed by six in the evening, usually, you thought of the sun coming up as _time to get to work_ and so he’d found that thinking of the moon setting was a far more motivating way to look at things. It meant that the moon was going off to rest, to sleep, because she’d done a good job.

It feels like bidding a dear friend goodnight.

And these days, Wonpil could use with a friend or two.

It’s been almost a year since Wonpil’s moved to Seoul to try living on his own, to convince his mom, his dad, and mostly, if he’s being honest, himself that he can do it. Since he’d begun his career at such a tender age, his mom has been his constant companion throughout his career: she’d flown with him from concerto to concerto, has been that one person on whom he could rely to take care of everything--from waking him up early in the morning to cooking his breakfast to submitting their travel documents to getting them sorted at the airlines. But now, Wonpil is 23. Now, his mom is getting too old for all of that constant travelling. Now, Wonpil thinks it’s for him to fully become an adult.

And also, there is the question of that _other_ thing. The one thing that he couldn’t really tell Dowoon about because as much as he loves Dowoon, Dowoon’s response usually consists of shrugging his shoulders and muttering some rather nihilistic thing under his breath--in the case of Wonpil’s concern: _everyone knows love sucks. Why bother? It’ll just distract you from your music._

 _Because_ is all Wonpil’s ever able to say around Dowoon. But if he had another friend to whom he could confide these fears, these strange excitements then he would tell them: because it seems odd to play these sonatas, these long pieces about great loves--care and feeling, joy and rebuke that have created such a big impression in space that they’ve left this impression that’s lasted the test of time, and never to have felt it for yourself. For all of his discipline, Wonpil is a playful person: given to joking and laughing and playing small pranks, is flirtatious and generous. He craves that kind of interaction, something--anything--to take his mind off of the regimented nature of his craft, if only for a second.

Wonpil’s one odd, strange desire, his wild hope, is that maybe out here in the capital, he’ll find love--and that however unlikely, however impossible, it won’t distract him from playing but rather, will finally lead him to write a great masterpiece of his own. Maybe finding love would wake something in him that would tip him off the precipice of being a great pianist into the vast tides of being an amazing one.

All this is on his mind this very early morning as he steps out onto the balcony to watch the moon fade into the early morning sky, cup of coffee cradled between two hands. He lets out a breath as he watches the horizon: caught between the dark blues of the night and the pale light of the dawn. He blinks, his east-facing balcony already starting to thin out the outline of the moon: it’s still bright but is just a sliver of silver on the horizon compared to the bright, luminous bulb she could be.

And that’s when he notices the man on the balcony of the building across the way from his.

He’s tall, pale in an odd, swan-like way--something in the neck, the curve of his nose, the way that his jaw was held. His hair is a smudge of platinum-blonde, so flaxen it’s almost white--windblown like someone had used their thumb to blur it across a canvass. His skin is pale in the moonlight, his mouth is curled upward in a soft smile. There’s a wine glass in his hand.

He’s leaning against the railing, looking up at the sky--Wonpil guesses that from where he’s standing, the stars are still bright. The light from his apartment is a bright white, spilling out from behind him, making the square of his apartment balcony look like a reel of film.

He’s beautiful, Wonpil thinks. The moon-man.

He blinks, a thrill of electricity running through him as he realizes that the man has turned his gaze toward him.

Their eyes meet.

The moon-man blinks.

Wonpil smiles.

On the balcony opposite his, the moon-man smiles, raises his glass as if in a toast.

_Cheers._

Wonpil mimics the gesture, thinking maybe if he’s still there tomorrow, or in the days to come, maybe he’ll introduce himself.


End file.
